_Serial Killers - Philosophy for Everyone_ investigates our profound intrigue with mass-murderers. Exploring existential, ethical and political questions through an examination of real and fictional serial killers, philosophy comes alive via an exploration of grisly death. Presents new philosophical theories about serial killing, and relates new research in cognitive science to the minds of serial killers Includes a philosophical look at real serial killers such as Ian Brady, Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer and the Zodiac killer, as well (...) as fictional serial killers such as Dexter and Hannibal Lecter Offers a new phenomenological examination of the writings of the Zodiac Killer Contains an account of the disappearance of one of Ted Bundy's victims submitted by the organization Families and Friends of Missing Persons and Violent Crime Victims Integrates the insights of philosophers, academics, crime writers and police officers. (shrink)

Explicit and implicit learning have been attributed to different learning processes that create different types of knowledge structures. Consistent with that claim, our study provides evidence that people integrate stimulus events differently when consciously aware versus unaware of the relationship between the events. In a first, acquisition phase participants sorted words into two categories , which were fully predicted by task-irrelevant primes—the labels of two other, semantically unrelated categories . In a second, test phase participants performed a lexical decision task, (...) in which all word stimuli stemmed from the previous prime categories and the primes were the labels of the previous target categories . Reliable priming effects in the second phase demonstrated that bidirectional associations between the respective categories had been formed in the acquisition phase , but these effects were found only in participants that were unaware of the relationship between the categories! We suggest that unconscious, implicit learning of event relationships results in the rather unsophisticated integration of the underlying event representations, whereas explicit learning takes the meaning of the order of the events into account, and thus creates unidirectional associations. (shrink)

Anders, Rudi Mental conditioning is like gravity; it feels so normal and ever-present that it often goes unnoticed, but it influences much human behaviour. I am not free when I am not aware how my ideas and attitudes are absorbed from my culture, family, the media and peers. It takes courage to stand alone.

Serial murders are not an unprecedented sort of violence, neither are they geo or ethnoconcentrated crimes, as it has been shown by Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who, in the nineteenth century, wrote some essays on violent crimes, especially those of sexual connotation. Serial murders have comparative low incidence. It is estimated that they correspond to less than 1% of homicides per year. However, its media appeal is conversely proportional to the estimation above, and dates back to 1888 with the serial killing (...) of prostitutes in the Whitechapel area of London. Such crimes where carried out by a stranger who called himself "Jack, the Ripper". In the 1970's and 1980's, a new generation of serial killers, such as Ted Bundy, BTK (Dennis Rader), Green River Killer (Gary Ridgeway) renewed the interest and the fear of the public on these crimes. Awe, in fact, was renewed because of the high recidivism and heinousness of the serial killer in detriment of the public order. But, paraphrasing Habermas (1990), what is the co-natural ius-philosophical discourse to the serial murder phenomenon? The perspective of Hans Kelsen embodies such discourse, whose subtext in a purely formallogical sense, can deduce a solution so heinous as the actual serial killer. (shrink)